Book Report: Hapgood

      1 Comment on Book Report: Hapgood

I think Hapgood is pretty universally considered one of the weakest of Tom Stoppard’s plays. And it is. There’s some fun stuff in it, some cleverness, but the three (or maybe four) levels that it is supposed to work on don’t really match up. That is, we care about it as a spy story, whether they will catch the double-agent, but we don’t care about it as a deep question of identity or as a story about our dependence on dualities and dualisms (and our frailty when they, like the Berlin Wall, collapse) or as a story of repressed inner conflict, or any of that. Well, I suspect that many people who saw the original story were interested in it as a story of having sex with twins who look like Roger Rees. Sadly, it’s Felicity Kendall doing it, but still. “I’m your dream girl. I’m her without brains or taste.”

I don’t think I knew, somehow, that Roger Rees was Welsh. He’s done, apparently, with the Williamstown Theatre Festival, which is too bad. They’ve hired Nicholas Martin, which is suppose is all right; I never saw anything at the Huntington during his tenure there, which only slightly overlapped with my time in Greater Bahston. I have to admit I was rooting for Darko Tresnjak, myself. Still.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.

1 thought on “Book Report: Hapgood

  1. irilyth

    I don’t think I ever saw a Darko production, but he’s become famous enough to have a Wikipedia page now. And he’s in San Diego; I wonder if he knows Amy’s mom or Jen Setlow…

    Reply

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